The Value of Diagnostic Information in Personalized Healthcare: A Comprehensive Concept to Facilitate Bringing This Technology into Healthcare Systems

Health systems in Europe seek to address patients’ unmet health needs for a range of acute and chronic diseases. Simultaneously, governments strive to keep healthcare spending sustainable and provide equal access to high quality care. This has fueled debate around what constitutes a valuable healthcare intervention in a health system and the corollary consideration of what governments are willing to pay for a certain health intervention. Even though high-quality, reliable information is a key enabler for effective, efficient and patient-centered healthcare, the value of information in general, and the value of diagnostic information (VODI) specifically, have not been part of the discussion until recently.

The paper ‘The Value of Diagnostic Information in Personalized Healthcare: A Comprehensive Concept to Facilitate Bringing This Technology into Healthcare Systems’, as a result of an international multi-stakeholder dialogue, explores ways to best define, evaluate, and reward the value created from diagnostics in healthcare and how to include these value considerations in decision-making processes. The authors eventually call for a holistic VODI framework that accounts for the full range of potential benefits of diagnostic testing, beyond the traditional clinical and health economic domains, and that is essential to recognize, measure, and fully leverage the benefits of diagnostics for patients, health systems, and society.